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Jury Decides Against Execution for Moussaoui

ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 3 — A federal court jury spared the life of Zacarias Moussaoui today, voting to send him to prison for the rest of his days rather than condemn him to death for the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001.

The jury of nine men and three women deliberated seven days before telling District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema this afternoon that it had decided not to impose the death sentence on the only person to stand trial in the United States for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Edward Adams, a court spokesman did not say whether the jury had voted unanimously to spare Mr. Moussaoui, or whether the jurors had failed to reach a unanimous decision on condemning him. The lack of unanimity on death would also spare Mr. Moussaoui's life.

"America, you lost!" Mr. Moussaoui shouted as he was led from the courtroom after the verdict was announced. His outbursts and rantings had become routine during the trial.

Mr. Adams said the jurors were unanimous on several factors that weighed against the defendant: that he wanted death or injury to result from terrorist acts, and that he showed a lack of remorse for his wrongdoing, for instance. But he said at least some jurors also embraced factors in his favor: that he had limited knowledge of the 9/11 plot, for example.

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Rosemary Dillard, left, and Lisa Dolan, who both lost their husbands in the September 11 attacks, spoke after the verdict was announced.Credit
Joshua Roberts/Reuters

No juror believed that Mr. Moussaoui was psychotic, Mr. Adams said, despite efforts by defense lawyers to portray their client as sliding in and out of mental illness.

Although Mr. Moussaoui testified that he was proud to belong to Al Qaeda and took delight in the 9/11 attacks, his lawyers portrayed him as a bumbling terrorist hanger-on who could not even avoid detection weeks before the assaults were carried out. To execute him, the lawyers argued, would be to grant him a martyrdom he did not deserve.

"Show some courage," the defense lawyer Gerald T. Zerkin told the jurors before they began to deliberate, adding that the trial "is more about us than it is about him."

The jurors rejected the prosecutors' arguments that death by lethal injection was the only fit punishment. "There is no place on earth for Zacarias Moussaoui," the prosecutor David Raskin told the jurors.

But there is: a prison cell. Judge Brinkema will formally pronounce the life sentence on Thursday morning.

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Abraham Scott and Carrie Lemack, family members of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, responding to the verdict today.Credit
Joshua Roberts/Reuters

The outcome must have been a bitter disappointment for prosecutors, who spent months assembling their case and called many relatives of 9/11 victims as witnesses. President Bush, whose Justice Department spent millions in quest of the death penalty, said shortly after the verdict that "the end of this trial represents the end of this case, but not an end to the fight against terror."

"Our thoughts today are with the families who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, 2001," the president said. "Our nation continues to grieve for the men, women and children who suffered and died that day."

Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty said the prosecution of Mr. Moussaoui had been "a maddening experience" at times. "But through it all, the victims have triumphed over the terrorists' ranks with their strength, their courage and their character," said Mr. McNulty, the former United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who testified in the penalty phase of the trial, said he would have preferred a death sentence. "Obviously I'm not personally involved in this," he said in a telephone interview on the MSNBC program "Hardball," "but I would have preferred a different verdict. But it does show that we have a legal system, that we follow it, that we respect it."

He said the jury's decision demonstrates that people in a lawful society can respect differing points of view. "We can have disagreements about whether the death penalty should be imposed on somebody like Moussaoui," Mr. Giuliani said. "I think it should have been. But I mean I've been a lawyer for more of my life than anything else and I respect a jury's verdict."

But the verdict was not disappointing to all the relatives of victims. "I think it's the best outcome," Don Goodrich, chairman of the Families of Sept. 11, told reporters. "The basic purpose of our criminal justice system is to deter future acts of this type, and putting him to death would not deter future terrorist acts."

Rosemary Dillard, another relative, said the verdict sends a powerful message. "What the jury came up with today in his sentencing is not going to be what all the families want," she said. "But what it shows the world is that we're not going to stand for terrorists to come to our country and be let loose. He will be in confinement. He will not be released. And we can all take pleasure or gratitude in that."

Abraham Scott, whose wife died in the Pentagon on Sept. 11, said that even though he favors the death penalty, he supported the jurors. "I totally and wholeheartedly agree with the decision of the jury today," Mr. Scott said. "We don't know what transpired that day or prior to 9/11 involving Moussaoui. Only Moussaoui knows and the Lord knows. I do know that the jury made the right decision."

Gov. George E. Pataki said he believed that death "would be a more appropriate penalty for the heinous act that cost the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent victims and economically crippled our city." But he added that he took pride in the fact that the nation "provides for the orderly and thoughtful application of our laws to even the most barbarous and heinous criminals." The jury did not decide Mr. Moussaoui's guilt; he did that himself months ago, when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the 9/11 attacks.

The jurors decided earlier that Mr. Moussaoui was indeed guilty of at least some of the deaths that day because, even though he was already in jail for immigration violations, he concealed what he knew about the unfolding terrorist plot.

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A verdict was reached in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui today.Credit
Bloomberg News

Next, the jurors weighed aggravating factors, like the horror of the attacks and the emotional damage heaped upon victims' relatives, against mitigating factors, like Mr. Moussaoui's turbulent childhood and possible mental and emotional instability.

But Mr. Adams said the jurors rejected not only the suggestion that Mr. Moussaoui was psychotic, but any notion that he had been cast spiritually adrift -- and thereby susceptible to militant Islamic terrorism -- by a chaotic childhood.

Mr. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers faced daunting obstacles. He refused to cooperate, or even communicate, with them. Sometimes he seemed bored, other times amused, or contemptuous. And he testified that he rejoiced in jail as he watched television accounts of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the crash of United Flight 93.

In the absence of any immediate comment from jurors, an obvious question is whether the fact that Mr. Moussaoui was in jail on the day of the attacks automatically made him appear to be a minor league terrorist, despite his grandiose claims. At times, he seemed more pathetic than evil. Clad in a green prison jumpsuit and wearing a white knit cap, Mr. Moussaoui cut a pudgy figure and looked anything but a cold-eyed terrorist.

Had the jury chosen death for Mr. Moussaoui, a 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent, the case could have stirred great bitterness between the United States and Europe, whose states generally oppose the death penalty. Several French journalists covered the trial, attesting to interest in the case on the continent.

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Television crews wait outside the courthouse for the announcement of the verdict today on whether al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui deserves execution or life in prison.Credit
Joshua Roberts/Reuters

The trial was marked by moments of heartbreak, poignancy and horror relived. Through it all, the defendant sat several feet from the lawyers who were fighting to save his life.

At times, he seemed to be doing his best to thwart them, as when he mocked the suffering of those who lost relatives, or seemed indifferent to the accounts of those who escaped the flaming section of the Pentagon and still feel guilty that others did not.

The prosecution called as witnesses people who lost relatives in the Twin Towers, or the Pentagon, or aboard one of the four doomed jetliners. But the defense called similar witnesses, who testified that, whatever their grief, they did not want Mr. Moussaoui to be executed.

One 9/11 relative, Lisa Dolan, thanked the Justice Department and the F.B.I. "Their understanding and their compassion throughout this experience has been unparalleled," she said.

The accounts of those who suffered personal losses on Sept. 11, 2001, produced tears among jurors and onlookers. And a collective feeling of horror and sorrow descended on the gathering as the prosecution played videotapes of people jumping to their deaths to escape the flames engulfing the Twin Towers.

One of the most dramatic moments came as the final minutes of United Flight 93 were relived, through the jet's cockpit-voice recorder and its flight-data recorder. The voice recorder captured the sounds of rebellious passengers trying to break into the cockpit to retake the plane from the four hijackers.

"In the cockpit!" a man shouts. "If we don't, we'll die!"

Moments later, the craft flipped over and dived into the Pennsylvania countryside.